me without you
by wizened cynic
Summary: The truth is, it gets lonely in heaven. JoanJudith. Sorta.


**disclaimer: **CBS, Barbara Hall, you know the drill. But I OWN Les Moonves.

**codes: **This fic is so incredibly AU. The Season 2 finale never happened.

**notes: **Title taken from the Michelle Williams' movie of the same name, so you can guess how squishy this fic is gonna be. Written for Hope's birthday. Which was over a month ago. Hm.

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Judith's heaven is like crazy camp, only without the shrink sessions, and the obligatory group sports, and the psychotic jackasses who pick a fight with you and then get you in trouble for retaliating, even though they started it in the first place.

Every morning, Judith wakes up at ten o'clock and skips breakfast. The first few days, she goes to Arts and Crafts, but it's not the same without Joan. Judith has no knack for lamp building, so she quits and goes to watch TV in the rec room, sometimes with others whose heavens overlap with hers. Because it's heaven, there aren't any commercial breaks, and they have free HBO and none of those channels that broadcast golf twenty-four hours a day. Judith mostly watches trashy telenouvelas, but one afternoon she gets bored and somehow she finds pay-per-view porn without having to pay first in order to view it. At first she is surprised, but then she remembers that it's her heaven, so it makes perfect sense. She and a couple of others make fun of the horny secretary who's doing the guy who changes the toner cartridges for the photocopy machine, and they end up waxing nostalgic and comparing their past sexual adventures.

They are allowed to smoke in the rec room in Judith's heaven, but Judith likes to take smoking breaks outside, and hang with people who politely disappear when she gets bored of them, or vice versa. And when they don't disappear, sometimes they will watch a movie together --- only the laughably bad ones, never anything that has won an Academy award --- and they contemplate stealing cars or shoplifting from the mini-mart, but it's not as much fun when you don't get in trouble for it.

From time to time, when Judith feels like it, she goes to school. The school is right at the edge of her heaven, straight across from the arcade and Starbucks. She is exempt from P.E., and she mocks those who are not, until she realizes that they probably enjoy it anyway, so she stops. The library has an excellent selection of reading material: the American _Vogue_, and the French _Vogue_, and the British _Vogue_, and for lighter reading, _Cosmopolitan_ and _US Weekly_. Judith's classes are in the afternoon, and she never has to do homework. For once, she actually enjoys going to school and learning about Greek myths and ionic compounds. The cafeteria food sucks, but cafeteria food isn't cafeteria food unless you can complain about it, so Judith doesn't mind.

When she isn't at school or hanging out or watching TV, Judith works in her garden. Back when she was alive, she used to worry that she'd kill the plants, because it's her and she screws up everything. But she's in heaven now, so she knows that the flowers will come up in the spring no matter what. Still, she tends to them carefully, nursing them with plant food and crushed eggshells, spraying the leaves with water mixed with vinegar to keep the bugs away. At first she only plants crocuses and tulips, but she thinks of Joan and adds sunflowers, and then she thinks of Friedman for whatever reason and she adds rosemary for remembrance. She gets dirt under her fingernails and grass stains on her jeans, and she goes to bed exhausted but happy.

Judith is pretty cool with being dead (not that she has much choice in the matter or anything) and she loves her heaven, but she gets a familiar prickly pain in her chest one day when she aces a test --- so it was open book and multiple choice, but she aced it, okay? --- and she has no one to show it to. She has a chat with God about it and asks, "Is it even possible to feel sad in heaven?"

"Sure," says God, who looks and sounds like Sally Field in _Steel Magnolias_. "You're sad because you miss the people you love and it's normal. It's good."

"Well, it doesn't feel good. It _sucks_, actually. Can't you do something about it? I mean, why should I have to miss them if I'm supposed to be with them all the time?"

The truth is, it gets lonely in heaven sometimes. Judith used to think that she's okay with being lonely, because she used to be lonely all the time, until Joan came along. But having Joan, and then not having her --- it's like being hungry again once you've known what it's like to be full. It's a new type of loneliness that Judith isn't prepared for.

"You can always visit," God offers, and Judith takes Her up on it. She drops by on her friends from time to time; she eats dinner with her parents more often than she ever did when she was alive, and she amuses herself by watching Joan entangle herself in whatever newfangled extra-curricular activity she manages to rope herself into.

But it's not the same, and when Judith's flowers finally bloom, bright yellow and lavender and pink, she wants to show them to Joan, but she can't. And when Joan sings in front of the auditorium in that zombie musical, when Joan gets in trouble over that overnight trip with Adam, when Joan finds out about Bonnie, Judith wants to tell her that she's there, she's always going to be there, but Joan can't hear her.

That's when it hits her.

Judith knows that even though she's in heaven, it cannot possibly be heaven, because Joan is not there with her.


End file.
